"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

Unlike the real Paul Ryan, Andy Borowitz's version at least grazes up against reality

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Ryanomics masquerades as "fiscal prudence," another reminder that way more pressing than our Deficit Problem is our Reality Gap (aka Truth Crisis), which would make it impossible to actually deal with deficits even if we weren't still in a depression.

"Speaker of the House John Boehner, appearing alongside Rep. Ryan, offered these words of praise for the Wisconsin congressman: 'Preachers like Harold Camping go around predicting the end of the world, but it’s guys like Paul Ryan who do the hard work of making it happen.'”

My friend Paul circulated the above, and while it sort of rang a bell, I didn't have any reason to think it was anything but Garrison K nailing it once again. In fact, he explained, it was written in 2004, and appeared in adapted excerpt from his book that was published as "We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore," in which he pondered the question "How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the party of Newt Gingrich’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk?"

Some of the ellipsized matter would have given the piece's age away. Here's the full paragraph:

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.

That is some kind of writing, and even if you read the piece way back when, I think you'll be exhilarated reading it again.

I don't suppose Garrison would have encouraged to think that the passage of seven years would make things much better, but I wonder whether even he would have expected them to get this much worse. In the interim the Greed & Selfishness Republican pulled the plug on the economy ("Just 'Cause We Can!!!"), managing magically to further enrich the superrich proprietors of the Greed &Selfishness Movement. And the American public, thanks to those decades of carefully engineered under- and mis-education, joyfully embraced the role of Rich People's Stooges under the guise of teabaggish "fiscal prudence." They've even anointed their own intelleckchul profit, the halfwit Paul Ryan.

Of course none of the Magnates of Greed & Selfishness have the slightest interest in fiscal prudence. Their only concern is pushing our already staggering level of income equality to ever-higher heights. All in all, what we have is much less a Debt Crisis than a Truth Crisis, now that the Economic Inequalizers have broken completely from any obligation to truth or reality. This calls for further discussion, but not today. For tonight we turn the floor over once again to the man with his finger on the funnybone of Ryanomics is Andy Borowitz.

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) – Presenting what he called a revolutionary plan to slash the nation’s mountain of debt, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) today proposed eliminating the Social Security program in its entirety and replacing it with Groupons.

“Instead of waiting each month for a check from Social Security, America’s elderly will receive valuable Groupons for everything they need, from Ramen noodles to cat food to caskets,” Mr. Ryan said in an appearance on Fox News.

Adding that Groupons would also help provide for elders’ medical needs, the congressman illustrated his point by holding up a Groupon offering 30 percent off on open-heart surgery in Cincinnati.

Moving on from Social Security, Mr. Ryan also proposed replacing Medicare with a new program in which seniors are shot at by Predator drones.

Additionally, Mr. Ryan said, in his new budget so-called “friends with benefits” would lose their benefits.

“If they’re really friends, they should be satisfied if the evening ends with a voucher,” he said.

Speaker of the House John Boehner, appearing alongside Rep. Ryan, offered these words of praise for the Wisconsin congressman: “Preachers like Harold Camping go around predicting the end of the world, but it’s guys like Paul Ryan who do the hard work of making it happen.”

The only difference between this and any actual Paul Ryan proposal is that this one contains just a whiff of . . . well, not sense, but at least reality (I mean, there really are such things as Groupons, which is more than you can say of anything that appears in the real Representative Ryan's jibber-jabber), that fearsome no man's land where no right-winger dares to tread.